Just this morning, I was thinking about Nintendo’s upcoming video game console, codename Revolution. At the time I was thinking about how fantastic a marketing and hype-building job Nintendo has been doing. The end line of my thinking was the only thing that Nintendo could do wrong at this point is choose a bad release name for the console and they’ve done just that; they’ve decided to call it the Nintendo Wii (pronounced like “we”). Now, certainly part of my dislike for the new name is based on having considered it the Revolution for so long and having a general repugnance for the practice of name changing (that’s a whole other discussion in and of itself); I expect that I won’t dislike “Wii” as much when I get used to it. That said, “Wii” is a terrible name for the US market; “Xbox” and “Playstation” aren’t great either but at least they can be pronounced without ambiguity and have some recognizable traits. In Nintendo’s defense, I think they’ve got “Revolution” planted firmly in a lot of heads so people are going to buy it regardless of the name and call it what they feel like; heck, I might just call mine a “Nintendo”.
Plus it sounds like “wee”. As in, “I went wee on that cat/dog/gerbil.”